The Giminid Reality, Part 2: The ablution is made, but not yet the offering
by Steve Crimi
There sits a sweet, spired old Baptist church up the block from us. We have long appreciated the non-hellishness of their sign out front. (We used to “collect” these sayings, our favorite being The Afterlife: Smoking or Non-Smoking?) Usually it reads something uncontroversial like God is Love. For the last two months the sign has read Stay safe. Wash your hands.
“Cleanliness is next to Godliness” aside, and the pure absurdity of Purelle sanitizing anything aside, the hand washing obsession points to an aspect of the dark ritual we inhabit now.
When in college forty plus years back, the I Ching, the Book of Changes, was my first “spiritual teacher”, real ones being in short supply back then. It was thrown so often (and once out the window!) that I was accused by a friend of not being able to decide which fork to use at dinner without consulting the oracle. But the end result was that the book was read and embodied. A few lines still stick to the sinews, like You cannot fight evil with more evil; you fight evil by making energetic progress in the good. Another, in the title of this piece, always haunted me, and comes from the commentary on Hexagram #20: Contemplation, Seeing into the Distance: The ablution has been made, but not yet the offering.
An ablution broadly means the performance of a formal washing before a ritual or sacrifice, usually of the hands. Some version of this is embedded in every sacro-religious culture: indigenous Americans “go to water” in streams; wuḍūʾ is the washing of hands, head and feet before the proscribed five-times-a-day Moslem prayer; Christians sacramentalize baptism as one of their holiest rites, probably derived from the ultra hydrocentric Essenes and the Jewish Pharisees, while a Catholic priest before the offering of the eucharist, intones lavabo inter innocents manus meas (“I will wash my hands in innocence” from Psalm 26:6, actually a scary invocation, given the recent predilections of much of this church); Hindus bathe in the Ganges, considered a version of the Mother Goddess; one can add examples ad infinitum. What is important is that water cleanses because it is the original fountain from whence we spring.
The ablution made, what is the offering? What is the sacrifice (Latin ‘to make sacred’)? The most famous ablution before a sacrifice comes literally at the hands of Pontius Pilate, who washes himself of responsibility before handing over the Christos to be ritually sacrificed (and following the three-day initiation time, returned in his resurrection body). Lady Macbeth, murdering King Duncan, tries to wash her hands of blood after the regicide, and of course cannot get the damn spot out (of her mind). The word sacrifice has understandably in the current world construct connotated a dark offering to forces—real or imagined—in order to obtain standing, power or goods within that construct. Ritual satanic abuse of children is the most horrific and unhuman manifestation of this. Hopefully, an understanding of the origin of the sacrifice will help in restoring its connection to the sacred, and overturn the inversion of its archetypal intent, manifesting as the miasmally prevalent corporate, government and media controller system.
The oldest continuous sacred tradition is the Vedic, and the language of its ritual, Sanskrit, is the only ancient tongue we know of how it was spoken, due to millennia of teacher to student transmission. The word yajña is the term for the Vedic sacrificial rites—of which there were many, and too complex to get into here—and is generally considered to derive from the root yaj, ‘to honor or revere’. Since etymology is highly speculative, and Sanskrit words multivalent, another possibility is to split it into ya and jña, ‘who’ + ‘wisdom’ (the word jñana is correlated with the English ‘knowledge’ and the Greek ‘gnosis’). In other words, who performs the ritual embodies wisdom.
To understand sacrifice, one must encounter the original sacrifice. This first sacrifice is the movement from divine unity, oneness, beginningless and endless eternality, into the experience of multiplicity, individuality, discreteness and linear time. The divine sacrifices itself for this to happen, in order to know itself, and according to mystic tradition, it not only happens at the end of unimaginably long time cycles, but moment to moment, one femtosecond sacrificed for the next to occur.
In the Rig Vedic tradition, the sacrifice was composed of hymns chanted by Rishis (rṣi)—poet-sages—that are musical, mathematical, incantatory, mythic and meaningful in ways scarcely comprehended now. These poems carried the chanter into the vision of the original sacrifice, and the poems were written from that vision. Soma helped. This is what held (dṛ, ‘to hold’ where dharma comes from, to hold together this original vision of cosmogenesis) the loka, or world together for these people in a sacred way. The word ‘karma’ from the root kṛ, ‘action or deeds’, originates from this ancient date referring to the activity of the sacrifice. A well-performed ritual is good karma, poorly performed bad karma. Good karma then was no less than generating and holding together a world in resonance with the divine movement of the one coming into manifestation, and returning again and again.
This is all to show the sacred origin of the sacrifice and its activity as karma. The term karma broadens in scope from the time of the Vedas (hotly debated, at least 1500 BC, but astrological and geographical indications could push the date back several thousand years) to the time of the Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga Sutras (as early as the time of Pythagoras). The Gita was written for the warrior class, so the ritual action of the Vedic hymns became extended from simply the efficacy of the ritual, to activity in the field of life, or the dharma-kṣetre, as it is called in the first line of that text. Good and bad karma still refer to the holding of a sacred vision, but now played out in the realms of all experience. Life itself is now the sacrificial arena.
In the context of the Gita, what is being sacrificed? Two things mainly: the concept of doership, that there is an enduring ‘I’ that is actually the entity responsible and in charge; second, the relinquishment of acting for the fruit of those actions, of karma. Looking for results traps one in further karmic entanglement. The sacrifice of selfhood and acquisition allows for the holding true to the dharma of the sacred vision that birthed these worlds of experience. Bringing in ablution, one can, for example, resacralize the morning ritual of taking a shower by seeing it as the cleansing before the sacrifice of your self-interests for the needs of the moment, of the day.
Two thousand years later the British took over and arrogantly ‘cultured’ India, and the Theosophists appropriated terms like karma for their own purposes. The long and short of it is that karma became personal, part of one’s reaping what one sowed, with one’s own karmic bank account, stored in the vaults of the hall of akashic records (another word stolen from the Vedic tradition and reformatted, akasha is the experience of space, see my previous post), whose accounts are only available to the ‘initiated’ elite. They become yet another priesthood guarding the gates between you and the sacred heart of your experience. Following this are hordes of British-educated Indian yogis happy to trade a few practices for the promise of ‘personal enlightenment’ or ‘self realization’, whatever those things are. These are all played out through uncountable reincarnations. Few know that reincarnation is not mentioned in the Vedic literature, certainly not as is generally considered today. The Buddha was asked about the paradox of his doctrine of no-self and reincarnation. If there is no self, what reincarnates? “Karma” was his answer.
So when the priesthood of corporate medicine tells you to continuously wash your hands—not simply with water, but also with carcinogenic chemical liquid—they are inviting you to participate in their dark inversion of a sacred sacrifice. The vision of their world is not about the movement of the sacred, but the sacrifice of your soul. Every time you wear a mask, every time you run to the dispensers for fear of a shopping cart, every time you think taking a vaccine will help clear the world of germs, every time you bristle when someone stands too close to you on a line, a piece of your soul chips off and is sucked into some dark being whose raison d’être is antithetical to the original sacrifice. And since these beings are uncreative brutes, they can only mimic and invert the ritual, and because true sacred access, our birthright, has been denied to all but the most intrepid of us. The majority participate dumbly in the evil karma of their oppressors by gladly adhering to these foisted rules, and end up simply becoming stepped down versions of archons, or in Vedic language, asuras, all the while thinking they are doing good karma. That is their great temporary victory, getting everyone to think they are acting for the ‘health’ of society, while each day their spirit is further calcified into black goo.
The ablution has been made, but not yet the offering. We sit now in limbo, the pregnant lacuna, staring down the abyss of possibility. The Greeks called it Kairos, the time out of time. Anyone kind enough to read this far needs no long sermon on the choice. And no one can have it both ways anymore. We see most of our community already has made the choice. Sadly, they have washed their hands of their humanity, their soul, and what little flickering spark of spirit remains is literally masked over. (Spiritusis breath in Latin. What can one inspire while covering the face? One can only reabsorb one’s own w-retchedness.) They await their opportunity to sacrifice their souls for the supposed safety of being concentration camp kapos (prisoners who run these camps for little breadcrumb perks), gladly running a prison planet for their oppressors, inexplicably deluded that they a working for what, everyone’s health?
And then what? Salvation from a vaccine? Sacrificing a meaningful creative life for having a contact tracing app run you? Bitter snorts when someone barges within five feet of you? Ratting out neighbors daring to extract a tad of enjoyment and love by the verboten act of hugging? What is truly scary is the level of not only acceptance, but embracing of all this petty tyranny. Instead of embracing each other.
For the rest of us, finding the sacred sacrifice in all this is also an abyss, an inchoate swirl of possibility, a future yet unprophesized. But to focus on the future is to lose the present. If we take care of what presents itself to us with integrity and spiritual discernment, the future will take care of itself. To impose our will on the future, without doing the internal ablution and sacrifice of looking for reward, is to doom the future to regurgitate the past. To sacrifice fear for resolve in the unmasked face of the current situation; to sacrifice the desires of our fictive selves for the needs of the moment; to stare down the personal and national shadow that always threatens to blanket our better nature, but scurries and dissipates with a mere focused glance: these are in no way easy, yet in every way necessary. There is no possible failure if we can hold to the light and vision of the original sacrifice, even if the entire cosmos implodes under the pressure of ubiquitous ignorance. The divine will sacrifice itself again, become us, and reset the whole damn thing.
